I think what I’ll start doing is posting a rendering(s) at the end of the each month to show the latest status of the project as a whole.

New buildings I’ve been working on are The Peninsula Condos, which I’ve just started, and the Duval County Public Schools building off to the far left. That building marks one end of the Southbank Riverwalk. The other end is just off of the frame camera-right by Friendship Park.

I’ve spent a couple of days getting the Illustrator file ready for import into Lightwave. I don’t have AutoCAD, which would be better suited for this task, so I colored the image to reflect what it would be like working in AutoCAD because that’s comfortable for me.

The Riverwalk is a fairly long single item, especially modeled at 1:1 scale. I’ve only begun adding details to it to fill it out. Texturing this will be interesting. The nearly 200 photos I’ve taken of just the Southbank Riverwalk have definitely been helpful in getting it ready for 3D.

I’m working on getting information together for creating the Southbank Riverwalk. It was a nice, overcast day on Monday, perfect for taking reference and texture photos.

The Southbank is fairly long and has quite a bit of detail to do correctly. I’m still debating on how much detail to add, but I’ve had to do extensive photo surveying to gather enough information to even get it in Lightwave. I have some basic shapes in Illustrator, which I’m going over and making sure it’s ready before importing it.

Take a look through some of the photos I took on Monday.

Using aerial photographs, I’ve created a working model now for the land and water masses for the project. There’s quite a bit of detail in the river shoreline so this wasn’t a 10-minute task. Additionally, I needed the ability for the land elevation to vary where needed. The land is heavily divided and tripled so that I can create displacement maps to easily accomplish this task.

This object is about a 12 square mile area that will give me enough horizon falloff when rendering. The 0,0 coordinates are set at the Main Street bridge. This gives me an easy reference point from where everything else will be.

Since I’ve also modeled everything to a 1:1 scale, calculating relatives distances and sizes for everything will be easier.

I’ve been taking survey photos this week, so I haven’t been concentrating on modeling much lately. While surveying for reference images, I took my first crack at creating an HDR photo today during sunset. I’m pretty pleased with the results.

For those not familiar with HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, creating an HDR image requires taking several exposures of the same photo, then using specialized software to combine the photos into one image. The resulting image has a tonal range of light information that a standard 8-bit digital photo cannot produce. This allows you to control the tonal range of the image, more or less brightening the shadows, and darkening the highlights all at once, so that you have more information in both of those areas than you normally would.

To create the HDR image I used Photomatix Basic v1.2 by HDRsoft. The Basic version of Photomatix is freeware and offers a limited set of options compared to the Pro version.

In the foreground you can see the recently completed exterior of the Penninsula, along with The Strand directly behind it. In the distance is the Main Street Bridge and the Northbank Riverwalk. It rained yesterday and looked like it was going to again today, which made for great clouds in the sky for the photo. I was standing on the Southbank Riverwalk to take this photo.

The goal will be to get 3D renderings to look this good. Back to work…

I just picked up the latest version of Swift 3D LW3. This software is pretty great. I’ve only had a chance to render out a few test scenes but it does a nice job at rendering my LW scenes to a vector Flash file.

This software will be used to create an interactive downtown tour once the modeling is completed. At that point the blog will become more of a side point and the focus of the site will be on the interface and the renderings.